Adopted 1 Year Ago – What We’ve Accomplished and What’s Next

We’re lucky to operate in the open-source world where dying projects can breathe new life with the right care and attention. We adopted Domain Mapping System just over a year ago to do exactly that - give new life to a plugin that offers amazing potential.
Domain Mapping Achievements

Since then, we’ve added a ton of capabilities that weren’t before possible with a single plugin, which has been the most exciting part for us. We’ve also learned a great deal in the process, so here’s a little bit about our accomplishments, learnings, and what’s ahead for the plugin.

What We’ve Accomplished

Subsites

We’ve found that many people need to map multiple pages to a single domain, which effectively creates a “subsite” within the main site. We prioritized adding this option because it’s powerful capability in a wide variety of situations.

Subsites can be extremely useful if you don’t want to have multiple WordPress sites to manage content for multiple domains. Instead of using a multisite, all the content for multiple domains can now be managed in a single WordPress install.

I wrote more on subsites in another article about domain mapping as an alternative to multisite.

Subdirectory Mapping

Mapping subdirectories to pages like your-site.com/subdirectory/ took some complex coding to validate and handle everything properly on both primary domains and subdomains. A HUGE shout-out to our wizard Lead Developer Raffi Yeghiazaryan.

We’ve even set up the capability to handle multiple subdirectories like your-site.com/mapped-site/blog/. This means you can have a separate domain and URL structure for any Archive on your site, like a blog or documentation.

Global Domain Mapping

When you have a ton of posts or pages, you don’t want to manually select each one for mapping.

The Global Domain Mapping option lets you enable a domain for all post types on your site.

Checkbox for Global Domain Mapping
Checkbox for Global Domain Mapping

Force Redirection to Mapped Pages

One of the interesting “loopholes” with domain mapping is that – by default – the page you are mapping can be accessed from both the primary domain and the mapped domain at the same time.

We’ve closed this loop by creating the option to force site visitors to see only the mapped domain of a post:

URL Bar Forcing Visitor to Mapped Domain
Forcing Visitors to See Mapped Domains

What We’ve Learned

First, our customers come from everywhere. Many kinds of projects need domain mapping – from freelance blogs to enterprise level ecommerce sites, and we’re glad to be working with folks who are managing businesses of all sizes.

Second, our BETA program is incredibly useful for releases. Though we do extensive testing with as many use-cases as possible, the WordPress ecosystem is rife with plugins, all types of code, and variable situations.

The BETA program is free to join for anyone, and it allows us to get useful feedback on new releases in live environments. We appreciate our BETA users immensely (special shout-outs to Vin from Fusion Tree and Davide from Sodo Design for some extra feedback in our latest release).

Last, but certainly not least, supporting the WordPress community has been the foremost value in all the work we’re doing. We provide email support and extensive documentation for all free users of the plugin because we know that domain mapping can be complex. Sometimes a quick tip can save hours of time, and we want everyone to be able to utilize the features they need.

What’s Coming Next

One of our first priorities is adding new capabilities to subsites, including the option to activate a different menu per domain and a different theme or custom styling per domain.

Aside from subsites, we’re also looking at creating an onboarding mechanism for users of your site to map domains. This would allow SaaS platforms to onboard a customer via the domain mapping page, and redirect them onwards to set up whatever service is offered.

Thanks to Armando Vias, we’ve identified some Accessibility improvements we need to make, and we’ll be adding those in the next few releases.

All these features and more can be found on our Roadmap (feel free to vote on anything interesting or share your new idea).

Thanks for reading and you can keep in touch on Twitter, Facebook, or by joining our budding Facebook community.

Brandon Ernst

Brandon Ernst

Brandon Ernst is the founder of Gaucho Plugins - the development team behind Domain Mapping System. Brandon writes about all sorts of topics in the WordPress plugin space related to domain mapping, eCommerce, and more. You can follow his journey on Twitter.

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